Google was sued by Getty and had to make the change.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
All the rest of the design choices was Google's, and we rightly blame them for purposefully degrading the experience of using Google Image search.
And Google could also decide to block websites, like Pinterest, that are gaming their search algorithms. That would be beneficial for everyone.
What is not fine, is to use that as a reason to completely screw up the rest of the design, when a small change could have been enough.
That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site, then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through traffic.
Tangentially, it would be great if Google sent like $1 (edit: or < $1; the amount isn't my point) per 1000 clicks out to websites whose search results get clicked. They already have an ad-engine that does all of this. This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.
Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.
> This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.
I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
(have not used Google search in a long time)
If you want to use an image that is not free, you should go pay for it, no? You have a link for the site. You can even go visit the site as a courtesy for free images. Are you saying Google should be paying for the images?
If you want to be mad at someone, look at getty - they take² people's images and charge for them, even managing to file DMCA takedowns on the author[1]. As a consolation, at least they host the images themselves.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180039
² Quick skim says they may merely let other people do the uploading of effectively stolen images.
Giving people a way to opt out doesn't absolve Google. They need to get permission to use the property of others, not default to using it unless told not to.
They're acting as if everything that isn't locked up, and doesn't have a note on it saying otherwise, is free for anyone to borrow.
> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.
Google can let people find sites without copying the content of those sites.
In fact, when Google copies your content, people are less likely to go to your site, the very opposite of "letting people find you".
0: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/german-federal-court-rules...
> The court in Karlsruhe does not regard the display of the preview images as an act of making available a copyright work in the sense of the copyright law. ... Since the decision handed down in the “Svensson” case in 2014, it is common ground that, in principle, the use of a hyperlink is not a copyright-relevant act.
> [translated] The plaintiff has made the content of its website accessible for search engines without making use of technical means to exclude the images of her works from the search and display by image search engines in the form of preview images.
0: http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/doc...
I am using entry page that brute forces password for accessing other pages. It takes a 30 seconds max on phone, but will raise cpu to 100%. Later it is stored to cookie. I havent seen any crawler get past that.
If I made a website like Image Search, hotlinked all the images and burried a visit website button somewhere as a ‘curtesy’, I’d be sued out of existence within a couple of weeks.
Paying websites with good SEO would make filtering out abusers of search engines (no meaningful content, scraping other websites and republishing, clickbait...) even harder, as there would now be a direct ROI on SEO.
At least someone has to pay for the book to be in a library.